Sumeet Kalsey

Protect Your Business Information: Data Security Guidelines

We live in a digital era and there are not only traditional hazards that endanger our business. Cyber attacks are becoming more and more common, and according to Forbes Internet and business data security is not only a technical issue nowadays.

According to a recent survey, more than 40% of the online attacks are organized by company employees. Sometimes, these are former employees, who seek revenge for their dismissal, but there are also cases in which some problems occur just because people do not know what to do in certain situations.

How should you protect your business information?

You probably think that cyber security is important only for large companies, but that is not true. All businesses are vulnerable to cyber attacks, especially the ones that don’t have a special part of their budget intended for hacker attacks prevention.

We offer you some tips that will help you protect your company and business from an eventual cyber attacks:

Train your employees to recognize the IT risks

If your employees are aware of them, would not dare to make hasty decisions and take unnecessary risks. There is no need form them to know all technical details, but knowing the basics is absolutely mandatory. It is also a good decision to ask them make a regular backup of the business information they work with or store it on an external hard disk, as well as on their computers and laptops at the office.

It is crucial to explain to your employees what security breaches there may be. This is especially important if you have some employees who don’t have any particular technological literacy. The same thing applies if you allow your employees to connect to your internal corporate network through their personal mobile devices.

Building a certain company policy concerning technologies and personal social networks accounts

Make sure your employees understand how and when to use their personal devices or social networks accounts when they are at their work place. Building a certain company policy concerning the information technologies they work with is absolutely necessary in order to minimize the risk from any hacker attacks. There should also be a specific protocol that should be strictly followed when it comes to a lost or stolen company device containing some business data.

We should be honest and confess the fact that most companies allow their employees to publish some positive information about the company on the Internet. However, the truth is that a great number of employees, who use their personal social media accounts, are sometimes rather careless and may unintentionally provide the society with some confidential business data.

So, what is the solution of this problem? Basically, you may encourage your employees to use social media accounts when this may be beneficial to your company, but you should teach them how to do that in a way that will not damage its reputation, i.e. without revealing any trade or company secrets in public or to any of your competitor’s companies.

Always use “smart” passwords

If we have to be completely honest, there is no actual password that will become an obstacle to malicious hackers, but you can at least try making your passwords more difficult. Choose longer passwords that include characters, letters and numbers. Make your passwords key-sensitive. Another important thing you should remember is changing your company passwords as often as you can.

Risk management

All companies should look at cyber security and business data protection as something that they can control. Every company, no matter how bit it is, should spend some money in order to protect their systems and information.